276 SYMBIOGENESIS 



highest organic forms which have now overrun the earth. How is it that 

 we find no traces of a creature endowed with large capacities for know- 

 ledge and happiness ? The answer that the earth was not, in remote 

 times, a fit habitation for such a creature, besides being unwarranted 

 by the evidence, suggests the equally awkward question why during 

 untold millions of years did the earth remain fit only for inferior 

 creatures? What, again, is the meaning of this extinction of types? 

 To conclude that the saurian type was replaced by other types at the 

 beginning of the tertiary period, because this type was not adapted to 

 the conditions which then arose, is to conclude that this type could not 

 be modified into fitness for the conditions : and this conclusion is 

 quite at variance with the hypothesis that creative skill is shown in the 

 multiform adaptations of one type to many ends. 



The answer to these great and hitherto puzzling questions, 

 to put it briefly, is that : 



(a) Evolution is constituted mainly by a gradual symbio- 

 genetic process which could not gain appreciably in momentum 

 until the web of life had become fairly complex; i.e., until 

 an adequate biological capital had been accumulated and the 

 appropriate biological values, such as character and social 

 dispositions, or, shortly, symbiotic condition, had arisen. 

 In other words, a biological species or group cannot make 

 progress any more than a highly organised society can be 

 evolved till there is an accumulated surplus of food, i.e., 

 capital, permitting leisure and higher and specialised 

 occupations. 



(6) That organisms have been left free (in a sense) to 

 choose between good and evil, and that many, in spite of 

 splendid opportunities to the contrary, have chosen retrogres- 

 sion by pathogenesis rather than progress by symbiogenesis ; 

 that is to say, by indulging in bad rather than in good adapta- 

 tions, in bad rather than in good " variability," i.e., by 

 failing in (bio-moral) loyalty to life. 



(c) That "fitness " is in the long run entirely a matter of 

 bio-economic (symbiogenetic) usefulness, and that creative 

 skill (and, for that matter, creative evolution also) is nothing 

 if it is not also symbiogenetic skill (symbiogenetic evolution), 

 i.e., that no amount of skill per se is of permanent avail unless 



